Marek Wilczynski - Böcker

The book is a study of the most recent American fiction, published at the turn of the 21th century, which demonstrates a renewed interest in the matters of history. Using the concepts of memory and experience, the author points at the ways in which subjective history has been created in the new «novel about history», written by such authors as William Gass, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson, Nicholson Baker, Aleksandar Hemon, and Jeffrey Eugenides. Theoretically, the study has been inspired by the works of Aleida Assmann, Hayden White, Reinhart Koselleck, Frank Ankersmit, and Dominick LaCapra.

This volume comprises a collection of essays by Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarussian, and American scholars in the fields of American Studies, literary history, art history, and political science. It is focused on the topic of experience as a concept related to the United States and analyses US history, literature, film, art, politics, and society. The essays deal with a wide range of problems and types of representation, from experience as a component of various theoretical discourses through the experience of foreign visitors and recent immigrants for whom America has often been a place of the Other. The volume once again proves that experience has been one of the key categories of American cultural self-understanding.

This volume of essays examines the relationship between eating and crisis. The United States’ long-lasting economic and cultural hegemony raises a number of questions: Has America been – literally and metaphorically – eating, appropriating, exploiting, and molding the world in its own image, or has it been eaten, appropriated, and exploited as a (frequently criticized or disdained) source of ideas, ideology, and knowledge? What is the relation between the current ecological crisis and America’s consumerist economy, with its practices of food production and consumption, and its use of natural resources? What is America’s role in the ongoing crisis of modernity? And, if the crisis continues, where are the sources of sustenance?

This book identifies a corpus of British and Polish texts that share correspondences with reference to the themes of feminine doubling, the difficulty of asserting feminine subjectivity, sexual mother-figures and symbolic father-figures. It draws on the Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and the French feminist uses of it known as écriture féminine – the theories of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. It also introduces the theories of the forgotten Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst, Sabina Spielrein. The first part of the book takes account of specifics of Polish culture and history that made women writers marginalised within this context. In the second part, it closely and comparatively examines the selected British and Polish texts, while giving voice to the unknown, stereotyped, or forgotten Polish works. The innovative features of the book include its comparative character and the implementation of various psychoanalytical approaches to the Polish texts.

This collection of essays is a tribute to Andrzej Kopcewicz, the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland. It coincides with the centenary of Imagism and what would have been Professor Kopcewicz’s 80th birthday. The title alludes to his first book which was devoted to the image and the objective correlative in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry. Image in Modern(ist) Verse opens with a revised and abridged version of that publication. Kopcewicz’s study can be still read as a useful historical, theoretical, and practical introduction to modern poetry. The bulk of the volume is made up of contributions by contemporary academics – Paulina Ambroży, Joseph Kuhn, Paweł Stachura, Jørgen Veisland, and Miłosz Wojtyna – who discuss various facets, strands and sub-strands of Imagism, as well as its ongoing legacy.

This book traces the interconnectedness of women’s sartorial practices and social change in 20th-century Britain. Based on a wide range of cultural texts, which include literary works, magazines, posters, advertisements and political cartoons, this study endeavours to prove that due to the metaphorical function of clothing, womenswear imparted significant information about women’s positions in society during transformative historical moments.

The book focuses on popular genres of romance, fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, thriller, and What-if historical fiction in popular books, in artistic literature and on the borderline between the two. The author analyses the work of writers such as Jennifer Greene, Barbara Delinsky, and Lilian Darcy, Jennifer Lee Carrel, Michael Crichton, Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, Michel Faber and William Golding. She applies an analytical approach based on semiotics, structuralism and narratology and discusses genre mixture, adaptation and intertextuality, as well as world modelling.

This book investigates post-industrial American cities as sites of struggle where political identities are mobilized and new modes of citizenship are articulated. This interdisciplinary analysis gleans insights from anthropology, literary criticism, cultural studies, geography, political philosophy, and urban studies. Drawing on scholarly, journalistic, essayistic, and fictional texts, the author examines the linkages between urban regeneration policies, citizenship, and social justice in the neoliberal city. She foregrounds grassroots and official strategies of community building, civic revival and democratic governance, as well as the right to the city, localism, and sustainability as key discourses and practices of re-configuring and re-inhabiting the urban.